Christmas Day

Mountain of Despair

It is Christmas Day. The snow is lightly falling and there is a silence to the world that is so
comforting. My cat Isabelle and I sat at the window for what seemed like hours just watching the snowflakes fall. It was so very beautiful.

I am on the second day of my ten day Christmas retreat and I am already feeling some of the tensions of the world drop away. I have been in a rough place this past week which I have tried to convey in the drawing above. I felt like a great heaviness weighed me down. I was so, so tired and it was a great effort to get through the day. An ache in my heart would break me open to some tears and the weight would lift for a few moments, only to come down heavily again.
The animus came in different forms in my nightly dreams and I tried to hold on to those feelings and those of my homework of being in the raging river......but there is such resistance in me to feelings of joy and lightness. It has been a battle that I have been waging for my whole life and especially these past 17 years of doing the dreamwork. I have a will of iron when it comes to hanging on to this despair. I see it, I know it but I just haven't had the will or desire to deny it.

Something is shifting in me now that my mother has died and Peter has gone away. I am alone with myself in a way that I never have been before. My body has also reached the point where it can no longer hold onto the tension and locked down feelings without some serious repercussions. I am addicted to Imitrex and other pain killers and I no longer have the strength to do even the most limited physical activity. I feel like a disabled invalid and that alone feeds the despair.

So this week of being on retreat is about waging a life or death battle with the pathology that I have let be in charge for so very long. I am going to fight to the death this part of myself that is ruining my life and has repressed this wild girl for far too long. She is in there and she is pissed.
In both my last Rooting Shen treatment and a recent Ayurvedic session there was a feeling from the practionners about this wild girl. They both sensed her wanting to come out. In diagnostic terms there is a volcano wanting to erupt in my liver and the more that I keep her in the more toxins are spilled into my system. I truly believe that my physical healing could be so very simple if I am victorious in this battle. And that is my work for these next eight days.....to behead the monster and to reclaim the girl.....